ABN AMRO to use escape room to recruit young employees in Amsterdam

ABN AMRO has announced plans to use an escape room to recruit new staff. Named Unigma, the escape room challenges students and young professionals to solve a series of problems in a limited amount of time. It offers an informal way of showing players their strengths and weaknesses and establishing a personal profile to help newcomers to present themselves on the job market. The mobile escape room will spend the coming months travelling around the Netherlands.

Tessa van Berckelaer of ABN AMRO Recruitment explains, ‘Many recent graduates fresh out of university have difficulty being noticed on the job market and deciding what job suits them best. Unigma can help them to find out what their personal qualities and talents are. It gives ABN AMRO a new way of presenting itself to students, while at the same time identifying young professionals who’ll be a good fit for the bank. No longer do we simply look at the best academic performances: more than that, we’re looking at newcomers who possess the right mentality, who are ambitious and proactive and who are focused on their development.’

Awareness and teamwork

Participants are test for four qualities: spatial awareness, logic, sensory awareness and teamwork. The challenges facing the students in the escape room are based on the acclaimed Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) method. Two players enter the escape room at a time, in separate mirrored rooms. A communicating window allows them not only to ask individual questions, but also to work together to solve challenges. The rooms contain tablets for asking friends for help, using Facebook Live. At the end each player is given a report explaining his or her personality. Having been developed in partnership with Sherlocked, the company that introduced escape rooms to the Netherlands, Unigma is the first escape room that uses psychological testing for recruitment purposes.